Fake marijuana drugs such as K2 and Spice are being used by fewer teenagers on the basis of being cheap and dangerous, according to the government's annual survey on drug use.
Making its entry in the United States in 2009, the use of synthetic marijuana spread among young people and led to a rise in emergency room visits and even deaths, the Associated Press reported. Some type of synthetic marijuana has been used by 8 percent of high school seniors this year, according to the report released Wednesday by the National Institutes of Health.
This is a sharp drop from 2012 when 11 percent of seniors admitted to experimenting with fake pot, AP reported.
Use of synthetic drugs has dropped among younger teens as well, with less than 1 percent of students experimenting with another new kind of illegal drug known as bath salts, said University of Michigan professor Lloyd Johnston, who heads the annual Monitoring the Future survey of more than 40,000 students in the 8th, 10th and 12th grades.
"The message has gotten out that these are dangerous drugs," Johnston said. "Their ever-changing ingredients can be unusually powerful. Users really don't know what they are getting."
Packaged to appear as pot, dried plant material is sprayed with various chemicals to make synthetic marijuana. A number of chemicals used to make synthetic marijuana were banned in 2011 by the Drug Enforcement Administration, but new chemical varieties have continued to emerge, AP reported.
Earlier this year, more than 200 people were sickened in a month by two new types of fake pot in Colorado, health officials discovered. Teenagers' perceptions have declined about the dangers of using marijuana, reported the annual survey. While more than 60 percent of high school seniors considered marijuana dangerous in 1993, it has declined to 40 percent this year.
The rate of usage is currently holding steady as 6.5 percent of high school seniors said they regularly used marijuana in 2013.
Recreational marijuana sales in Colorado and Washington state will become legal for people over 21 in some weeks. Opponents of legalized marijuana long have said they worried about its impact on children, according to AP. As perceptions of marijuana being a dangerous drug continue to decline, its use will keep increasing among teenagers, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
According to AP, while marijuana remains illegal under federal law, the Justice Department in August pledged not to target the marijuana industry in states where the drug has been legalized as long as the states keep pot away from children, other states, criminal cartels and federal property.
The production, sale and use of recreational marijuana has been legalized in only two states, with medical marijuana being allowed in 18 others and the District of Columbia.
